I don't think there are other bonuses, just a greater chance for, say, a transuranic world to have major or abundant trillum. The organic bonus is legit though, I first saw it mentioned in a thread somewhere on this forum. I can't seem to find the post right now, but if you look at a cave world and an ocean/earthlike with the same tech, efficiency and pop the ocean/earthlike one will make more organic goods. Apart from the lack of this bonus cave worlds are exactly like ocean/earthlike ones in terms of max pop etc. It seems to be +40% for earthlike and +60% for ocean. I only really started to pay attention to this rebuilding after the war.

Basically, if you want the most out of your worlds you should always have ocean/earthlikes as CGAs.

As to the tech level for CGAs, unless your running some crazy lowtech empire you are always going to want luxuries, so that means a min tech level of 7. Since you are going to 7, you may as well go to 8 to unlock the last pop upgrade structures. At 9 and 10 a world needs more stuff, trillum, hexacarbide etc, making it too expensive. So 8 seems to be the perfect level. Maybe only 7 for desert planets, since they get no population upgrades (my imperial engineers can build an arcology on a volcano or acid world but show them a little sand and they go all to pieces).

In light of the recent war, how do people feel about planetary defense structures? When and where are they worth building, if at all? How about citadels with their jumpmissiles and infantry?

My 2 cents:

From what I can see, defenses (planetary and citadels) are geared towards countering gunships and starships, but in the vast majority of the cases attacks are performed with jumpships. Cannon-based planetary defenses are supposed to be good against jumpships, but in practice that's just not the case. HEL cannons, being a TL 4 structure, are too weak, while plasma towers need chronimium (doens't matter if it's not a lot; if I want to build those I need to have a chronimium refinery world nearby). Autocannon satellites orbit above the planet, so they get spread out much more than anything on the surface. These issues notwithstanding, none of the cannon-based defenses can out-range a jumpship, so against a sufficiently large fleet, they only get to fire one shot before getting destroyed.

Missile-based defense are obviously futile against even stingers, but they do decently against gunships. It clearly isn't realistic to expect planetary defenses to repel even a medium-sized fleet, but a gunship fleet, no matter how large, will suffer losses against hypersonic missile sites. IMO there should exist some parallel situation for jumpships that prevents them from plowing through dozens of planets with impunity, but so far I don't know any setup that can accomplish that.

Citadels appear to be a counter to starships that nobody ever uses for offense since they're so slow. As a result, jumpmissiles never have any good targets to fire at. Using the missiles against jumpships is a joke since they can't be produced in comparable quantities and have to be fired manually. The ability for citadels to produce basic infantry is also quite useless, since I could just designate that planet a sector capital for making imperial guards.

At the end of the day, the output of every planet goes into supporting a shipyard, so planetary defenses carry with them an opportunity cost. If I suffer an attack, I need ships that I know I can use to retaliate with, rather than some static defenses that won't even slow the enemy down. Assigning ships for planetary defense requires way too much management and leaves them vulnerable to be picked off one by one. Therefore, I don't think it's really possible to adequately defend every planet, which is what enabled the Commonwealth to take a bite out of Bismalia with just its starting fleet.

gc2 wrote:Citadels appear to be a counter to starships that nobody ever uses for offense since they're so slow. As a result, jumpmissiles never have any good targets to fire at. Using the missiles against jumpships is a joke since they can't be produced in comparable quantities and have to be fired manually. The ability for citadels to produce basic infantry is also quite useless, since I could just designate that planet a sector capital for making imperial guards.

I completely agree about the jumpmissiles, but I like citades just because they produce so much infantry. As a low-tech designation (TL 5-6 is where I keep citadels), they seem to produce basic infantry far faster than even a troop world.

6cef wrote:what's the downside to designating a very large number of worlds as sector capitals?

The thing about sector capitals is that when they are conquered, they steal a few worlds with them. My capital was conquered and the attacking empire got more than 1000 ground forces and a couple hundred thousand jumpships/transports/cruisers completely for free, as well as several worlds with their space defenses (HEL cannons and the like) completely intact. The biggest downside to having many sector caps would have to be the sheer number of worlds/troops/ships that would get taken without a struggle.

Behold my avatar, one of the few ships to be drawn out pixel by pixel in the dreaded... Microsoft Paint!
Day 31: "I have successfully completed my time reversal experiment! Muahahaha!!!"
Day 30: "I might have run into a little problem here."

Right now, temporarily designating every captured world as a sector capital seems to be a viable strategy when conquering worlds outside your existing sphere of influence. Even if one of the planets gets retaken by the enemy, nothing goes with it since sector capitals can't make other sector capitals defect. As a bonus, if you're in Law & Order every planet will be producing imperial guards and this will prevent them from going into civil war.

Watch TV, Do Nothing wrote:Right now, temporarily designating every captured world as a sector capital seems to be a viable strategy when conquering worlds outside your existing sphere of influence. Even if one of the planets gets retaken by the enemy, nothing goes with it since sector capitals can't make other sector capitals defect. As a bonus, if you're in Law & Order every planet will be producing imperial guards and this will prevent them from going into civil war.

It really trashes efficiency to do this, and you can't build any ships with the L&O doctrine, but it's probably the best short-term strategy for conquest. Many empires are notorious for neglecting ground forces, and making Imperial Brigade Guards is going to create huge losses in whatever little amount of forces they have.

Last edited by catfighter on Sun Mar 15, 2015 8:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Behold my avatar, one of the few ships to be drawn out pixel by pixel in the dreaded... Microsoft Paint!
Day 31: "I have successfully completed my time reversal experiment! Muahahaha!!!"
Day 30: "I might have run into a little problem here."

6cef wrote:It's hard to tell with trade being at best opaque and at worst buggy, but will trade hubs not move commodities of a higher TL than the hub?

I had a hub connecting a starship autofac with a starshipyard, and the hub *seemed* to refuse to import high level components until I raised the hub's TL high enough.

Of course, it could just be the weird setting/resetting of the trade routes that seems often necessary.

Has anyone else seen this or am I just imagining things?

You're not alone in your hallucinations (pardon the pun, Watch TV ). Hubs on both alpha and beta refused to transfer luxuries until I advanced to TL 7 because the hubs themselves did not need any. You should probably stick this in the Bugs thread; a good find.

Kourtious wrote:Ramjets cannot fly between 2 different nebulaes.

That is correct, much to the chagrin of the Mandalorians who wanted to colonize Felor space.

Behold my avatar, one of the few ships to be drawn out pixel by pixel in the dreaded... Microsoft Paint!
Day 31: "I have successfully completed my time reversal experiment! Muahahaha!!!"
Day 30: "I might have run into a little problem here."

the 29% loss is largely from the smaller fleet of stingers. that fleet was comprised of groups of ~6k stingers each attacking 49k hypersonic missile sites. it should not be surprising that their missile defenses were overwhelmed.

if these two fleets were combined into a single fleet, or if you had microed the larger groups of stingers to attack first and set the smaller groups to high orbit, the losses would be significantly less.

and of course, using eldritch jumpships, you'd have seen losses even closer to 0.

catfighter wrote:Hubs on both alpha and beta refused to transfer luxuries until I advanced to TL 7 because the hubs themselves did not need any. You should probably stick this in the Bugs thread; a good find.

the more i play with trade hubs, the less i think some of the things i'm seeing are bugs, and more just how trade works.

i think there's a bit of strategy involved with trade knowing that for a hub to assist with luxuries, which often wind up being an issue for parts of my empire, you have to decide to raise the hub to tl7, which means you better have reduced the population of that hub as far as possible or it's going to be uselessly consuming many of the precious luxuries you're importing through it.

maybe hubs should just mindlessly transport anything but there's some logic to a hub not transporting components and commodities of higher tl's. think the UPS guy on a digial world who has no idea what this basilisk cannon is from a quantum world.

This is a bug, I believe. No ship can enter rift zones (white areas). But a ramjet should be able to travel between light (purple) and dark nebulae. If you can reproduce this, then I'd love it if someone could add a bug to Ministry.